I could do with some help/suggestions for the approach I should take to improve a database extract I perform. Not asking for a complete solution, just some good advice on the approach I should spend my time learning/developing....

I have read-only access to a (third party's) mysql database which I import into sql server 2012 (my reporting database/server). Currently I do this by dropping each table and then recreating it and re-importing all the data. The database is very large and I would value some suggestions on how I could better this approach to insert only new rows or those that have been updated in the mysql tables.

But again for identifying the incremental data you should ideally have a primary key of audit column. Even otherwise you should have a combination of columns which can identify a unique row.Once thats there you can use Slowly Changing Dimension Wizard or a combination of lookup task and conditional task to do the incremental data merge.

you could also maintain a separate control table to monitor the process as well as capture last combintaion of column value to identify increments if they follow a sequence

The linked server has been in place for ages, every table has a primary key column. What I'm interested in is moving away from my current process which drops all my reporting tables, then re-imports everything, and move onto a process which only imports new rows or rows that have had some data modified.

I figured this would be a fairly common request and pretty standard options would exist in SSIS to achieve this, any ideas?

The linked server has been in place for ages, every table has a primary key column. What I'm interested in is moving away from my current process which drops all my reporting tables, then re-imports everything, and move onto a process which only imports new rows or rows that have had some data modified.I figured this would be a fairly common request and pretty standard options would exist in SSIS to achieve this, any ideas?